The newest version of KDE Four Live, an openSUSE-based Live CD for testing KDE 4, was released three days ago, just nine days after the initial version that included Release Candidate 1 was released. KDE/openSUSE dev Stephan Binner announced the release on his blog, celebrating the strong public interest in the initial RC1-based Live CD - over 10000 downloads achieved in the first few days. Meanwhile, although mainstream reviews of RC1 are still scarce, Binner's blog announcement of the previous version contained this interesting tidbit: "It looks like whatever [version of KDE 4] will be released or presented at the event which was fixed by the sponsor to happen in January will be only used by very early adopters. Hopefully openSUSE 11.0 will be able to ship some KDE 4.1.x release or some very high KDE 4.0.x release (which saw some light features freeze lift),"he wrote. Readers are welcome to download the newest Live CD (Torrent) and test it for themselves. A Debian LiveCD is also available, but it still includes KDE4 Beta4 and not RC1.

I say that I've had many problems with the reliability of and never been happy with both knm AND (GNOME) nm. I want a totally reliable, hot-swap proof wifi GUI where I only have to enter my WEP/WPA(2) password ONCE unless I decide to change it. I have only seen these requirements met with Mandriva's own network/wifi management tool - Mandriva 2008 having by far the best wifi networking support I've seen yet in a Linux distro.

What is all this nonsense with knm and kwallet?? I need to enter a password to use kwallet which makes a sick joke of the whole situation!? No I DON'T want kwallet to remember my password as I don't want to enter a password for my passwords!! Is this a joke? nm does remember my passwords without a password but still has its quirks and doesn't work sometimes.

The drak tools are GPL right? What about 'KDE4-ifying' Mandriva's network manager because it really does work! I've been publicisig this quite a lot because Mandriva have done a great job here of solving one of Linux's biggest remaining weak spots- EASY, RELIABLE WIFI.

KDE devs: please just ignore the sad trolls. Why do people pay ANY attention to the KDE/GNOME mudslinging? Its totally immature and pointless. We're all very lucky to have (at least) 2 great FOSS DE's and its good that they have different philosophies, designs and toolkits.

Keep up the great work KDE (and GNOME) devs! Now I'm going to check out this new KDE4 live CD!!!

What is all this nonsense with knm and kwallet?? I need to enter a password to use kwallet which makes a sick joke of the whole situation!? No I DON'T want kwallet to remember my password as I don't want to enter a password for my passwords!! Is this a joke? nm does remember my passwords without a password but still has its quirks and doesn't work sometimes.

I use a blank password for kwallet and have never had an issue, I'm not sure where the quirks would lie. It's part of the KDE infrastructure, and is utilized by kmail, konq etc. so it's fairly transparent. If you're having problems with kwallet integration, then you should open a bug report with your distro because it's more than likely an issue with the base libraries rather than knm. Really, the integration is not a cataclysmic problem, and for users that prefer the security of having transparent login credentials for a variety of services including web and email clients, kwallet integration is a huge benefit.

NM is the future for desktop-based network management, it's only problem is that it's reaching farther ahead than many of the drivers are capable of supporting yet. It relies on hal and udev functionality that not everyone supports correctly, but then that's neither Red Hat nor linuxs fault in general.

Sure, Mandriva has their own infrastructure, as does openSUSE and I'm sure various others, but they invariably consist of scripted workarounds for a variety of corner cases to deal with network driver quirks and inconsistencies. They're a stop-gap without a long term outlook.

NM has many warts right now, but it makes more sense to support and contribute towards it, since it represents a universal solution, rather than an infrastructure-specific one. Ideally we'll start to see more and more of the wireless drivers port to softmac and present more of a standardized API, at which point many of the more common problems with NM should (hopefully) start to disappear. That's where the real issue lies.

If somebody wants to port Mandriva's backend to solid, KDE4 will work transparently with it, by design. But I'm sure the devs knew what they were doing when the opted towards networkmanager as a default.